Hockney depicted in The Threads That Bind Us, embroidered hanging, by Morwenna Catt and Lucas Stephens, Bradford City Hall

Hockney was born in Bradford, England, on 9 July 1937 to Laura and Kenneth Hockney (a conscientious objector in the Second World War), the fourth of five children.[7][8] He was educated at Wellington Primary School, Bradford Grammar School, Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj.[7] While there, Hockney said he felt at home and took pride in his work. At the Royal College of Art, Hockney featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries—alongside Peter Blake—that announced the arrival of British Pop art. He was associated with the movement, but his early works display expressionist elements, similar to some works by Francis Bacon. When the RCA said it would not let him graduate in 1962, Hockney drew the sketch The Diploma in protest. He had refused to write an essay required for the final examination, saying he should be assessed solely on his artworks. Recognising his talent and growing reputation, the RCA changed its regulations and awarded the diploma.

A visit to California, where he subsequently lived for many years, inspired him to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in the comparatively new acrylic medium rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours. The artist moved to Los Angeles in 1964, returned to London in 1968, and from 1973 to 1975 lived in Paris. He moved to Los Angeles in 1978, at first renting the canyon house he lived in and later bought the property and expanded it to include his studio.[9] He also owned a 1,643-square-foot beach house at 21039 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, which he sold in 1999 for around $1.5 million.

Hockney is openlygay,[10] and unlike Andy Warhol, whom he befriended, he openly explored the nature of gay love in his portraiture. Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman, the works refer to his love for men. Already in 1963, he painted two men together in the painting Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, one showering while the other washes his back.[11] In summer 1966, while teaching at UCLA he met Peter Schlesinger, an art student who posed for paintings and drawings.[12]

On the morning of 18 March 2013, Hockney's 23-year-old assistant, Dominic Elliott, died as a result of drugs, drinking acid and alcohol at Hockney's Bridlington studio. Elliott was a first- and second-team player for Bridlington rugby club. It was reported that Hockney's partner drove Elliott to Scarborough General Hospital where he later died.[13][14]

Hockney painted portraits at different periods in his career. From 1968, and for the next few years he painted friends, lovers, and relatives just under lifesize and in pictures that depicted good likenesses of his subjects. Hockney's own presence is often implied, since the lines of perspective converge to suggest the artist's point of view.[11] Hockney has repeatedly returned to the same subjects - his parents, artist Mo McDermott (Mo McDermott, 1976), various writers he has known, fashion designers Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark (Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970–71), curator Henry Geldzahler, art dealer Nicholas Wilder,[15] George Lawson and his ballet dancer lover, Wayne Sleep.[11]

On arrival in California, Hockney changed from oil to acrylic paint, applying it as smooth flat and brilliant colour. In 1965, the print workshop Gemini G.E.L. approached him to create a series of lithographs with a Los Angeles theme. Hockney responded by creating a ready-made art collection.[16]

In the early 1980s, Hockney began to produce photo collages, which he called "joiners",[17] first using Polaroid prints and subsequently 35mm, commercially-processed color prints. Using Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject, Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image.[18] An early photomontage was of his mother. Because the photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism, one of Hockney's major aims—discussing the way human vision works. Some pieces are landscapes, such as Pearblossom Highway #2,[5][19] others portraits, such as Kasmin 1982,[20] and My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982.[21]

Creation of the "joiners" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses. He did not like these photographs because they looked somewhat distorted. While working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles, he took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. On looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as if the viewer moved through the room. He began to work more with photography after this discovery and stopped painting for a while to exclusively pursue this new technique. Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its 'one eyed' approach, however,[22] he returned to painting.

In 1976, at Atelier Crommelynck, Hockney created a portfolio of 20 etchings, The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso.[23] The etchings refer to themes in a poem by Wallace Stevens, "The Man With The Blue Guitar". It was published by Petersburg Press in October 1977. That year, Petersburg also published a book, in which the images were accompanied by the poem's text.[24]

Hockney was commissioned to design the cover and pages for the December 1985 issue of the French edition of Vogue. Consistent with his interest in cubism and admiration for Pablo Picasso, Hockney chose to paint Celia Birtwell (who appears in several of his works) from different views, as if the eye had scanned her face diagonally.

In December 1985, Hockney used the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program that allowed the artist to sketch directly onto the screen. Using the program was similar to drawing on the PET film for prints, with which he had much experience. The resulting work was featured in a BBC series that profiled a number of artists.

Hockney returned more frequently to Yorkshire in the 1990s, usually every three months, to visit his mother[25] who died in 1999. He rarely stayed for more than two weeks until 1997,[25] when his friend Jonathan Silver who was terminally ill encouraged him to capture the local surroundings. He did this at first with paintings based on memory, some from his boyhood. Hockney returned to Yorkshire for longer and longer stays, and by 2005 was painting the countryside en plein air.[25] He set up residence and an immense redbrick seaside studio, a converted industrial workspace, in the seaside town of Bridlington, about 75 miles from where he was born.[26] The oil paintings he produced after 2005 were influenced by his intensive studies in watercolour (for over a year in 2003–2004).[27] He created paintings made of multiple smaller canvases—nine, 15 or more—placed together. To help him visualize work at that scale, he used digital photographic reproductions; each day's work was photographed, and Hockney generally took a photographic print home.[25]

In June 2007, Hockney's largest painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter, which measures 15 feet by 40 feet, was hung in the Royal Academy's largest gallery in its annual Summer Exhibition.[28] This work "is a monumental-scale view of a coppice in Hockney's native Yorkshire, between Bridlington and York. It was painted on 50 individual canvases, mostly working in situ, over five weeks last winter."[29] In 2008, he donated it to the Tate Gallery in London, saying: "I thought if I'm going to give something to the Tate I want to give them something really good. It's going to be here for a while. I don't want to give things I'm not too proud of ... I thought this was a good painting because it's of England ... it seems like a good thing to do."[30]

Since 2009, Hockney has painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes using the BrushesiPhone[31] and iPad[32] application, often sending them to his friends.[32] His show Fleurs fraîches (Fresh flowers) was held at La Fondation Pierre Bergé in Paris. A Fresh-Flowers exhibit opened in 2011 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, featuring more than 100 of his drawings on 25 iPads and 20 iPods.[33] In late 2011, Hockney revisited California to paint Yosemite National Park on his iPad.[34] For the season 2012–2013 in the Vienna State Opera he designed, on his iPad, a large scale picture (176 sqm) as part of the exhibition series Safety Curtain, conceived by museum in progress.

Hockney had his first one-man show when he was 26 in 1963, and by 1970 the Whitechapel Gallery in London had organized the first of several major retrospectives, which subsequently travelled to three European institutions.[37] In 2004, he was included in the cross-generational Whitney Biennial, where his portraits appeared in a gallery with those of a younger artist he had inspired, Elizabeth Peyton.[3]

In October 2006, the National Portrait Gallery in London organized one of the largest ever displays of Hockney's portraiture work, including 150 paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks, and photocollages from over five decades. The collection ranged from his earliest self-portraits to work he completed in 2005. Hockney assisted in displaying the works and the exhibition, which ran until January 2007, was one of the gallery's most successful. In 2009, "David Hockney: Just Nature" attracted some 100,000 visitors at the Kunsthalle Würth in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany.[25]

From 21 January 2012 to 9 April 2012, the Royal Academy presented A Bigger Picture,[38] which included more than 150 works, many of which take entire walls in the gallery's brightly lit rooms. The exhibition is dedicated to landscapes, especially trees and tree tunnels.[39] Works include oil paintings and watercolours inspired by his native Yorkshire. Around 50 drawings were created on an iPad[40] and printed on paper. Hockney said, in a 2012 interview, "It's about big things. You can make paintings bigger. We're also making photographs bigger, videos bigger, all to do with drawing."[41] The exhibition moved to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain from 15 May to 30 September, and from there to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, between 27 October 2012 and 3 February 2013.[42]

From 26 October 2013 to 30 January 2014 David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition was presented at the de Young Museum, one of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, showing work since 2002 and including Photoshop portraits, multi-canvas oils, iPad landscapes and digital movies shot with multiple cameras.[43]

'Hockney, Printmaker', curated by Richard Lloyd, International Head of Prints at Christie's, was the first major exhibition to focus on Hockney's prolific career as a printmaker.[44] The exhibition ran from 5 February 2014 to 11 May 2014 at Dulwich Picture Gallery before going on tour to The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle.[45][46]

Many of Hockney's works are housed in Salts Mill, in Saltaire, near his home town of Bradford. Writer Christopher Isherwood's collection is considered the most important private collection of his work. In the 1990s, Isherwood's long-time partner Don Bachardy donated the collection to a foundation. His work is in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including:

He was a Distinguished Honoree of the National Arts Association, Los Angeles, in 1991 and received the First Annual Award of Achievement from the Archives of American Art, Los Angeles, in 1993. He was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust, New York in 1992 and was given a Foreign Honorary Membership to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1997. In 2003, Hockney was awarded the Lorenzo de' Medici Lifetime Career Award of the Florence Biennale, Italy.[54]

Commissioned by The Other Art Fair, a November 2011 poll of 1,000 British painters and sculptors declared him Britain's most influential artist of all time.[55]

From 1963, Hockney has been represented by art dealer John Kasmin, as well as by Annely Juda Fine Art, London. On 21 June 2006, Hockney's painting, The Splash sold for £2.6 million.[56] His A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 paintings that combined to produce one enormous picture, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million. Beverly Hills Housewife (1966–67), a 12-foot-long acrylic that depicts the collector Betty Freeman standing by her pool in a long hot-pink dress, sold for $7.9 million at Christie's in New York in 2008, the top lot of the sale and a record price for a Hockney.[3]

In the 2001 television programme and book, Secret Knowledge, Hockney posited that the Old Masters used camera obscura techniques that projected the image of the subject onto the surface of the painting. Hockney argues that this technique migrated gradually to Italy and most of Europe, and is the reason for the photographic style of painting we see in the Renaissance and later periods of art. He published his conclusions in the 2001 book "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters," which was revised in 2006.[3]

In 2005, Burberry creative director Christopher Bailey centred his entire spring/summer menswear collection around the artist and in 2012 fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, a close friend, named a checked jacket after Hockney[62] In 2011 British GQ named him one of the 50 Most Stylish Men in Britain and in March 2013 he was listed as one of the Fifty Best-dressed Over-50s by The Guardian.[63]

In 2012, Hockney, worth an estimated $55.2 million (approx. £36.1 m) transferred paintings valued at $124.2 million (approx. £81.5 m) to the David Hockney Foundation, and gave an additional $1.2 million (approx. £0.79 m) in cash to help fund the foundation's operations. The artist plans to give away the paintings, through the foundation, to galleries including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Tate in London.[68]

Sancar Seckiner's new book South (Güney), published July 2013, consists of 12 article and essays. One of them, American Collectors, re-focus on David Hockney's importance in the philosophy of art. Ref. ISBN 978-605-4579-45-7.